


as you stumble in the debris (London, 1983)

by cumaeansibyl



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Drunk girls in bathrooms: the best of humanity, Female-Presenting Crowley (Good Omens), He's using male pronouns though, Hopeful Ending, It's the 80s and no one is happy about it, M/M, Pining, Unrequited Love, canon-typical alcohol use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:07:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22389163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cumaeansibyl/pseuds/cumaeansibyl
Summary: Crowley needs to be someone else tonight. Who he is isn't working out.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 52
Kudos: 156





	as you stumble in the debris (London, 1983)

**Author's Note:**

> Crowley is presenting as female but using he/him pronouns. Sometimes he really is a woman, but not tonight.

Crowley’s thigh-high black patent boots are making him sweat behind the knees, his studded belt’s digging into his ribcage, and his black wig itches. He’s still not managed to persuade Hell, conservative as the shrillest coven of concerned Christian mothers, that “goth” does not equal “unlimited free souls, no waiting,” so here he is in _another_ grotty nightclub hunting up _another_ lower-management numpty who might theoretically exchange his soul for a fat bank account and guaranteed success with the ladies. They all have the same cramped imagination and the same boring ambitions and they’re uniformly rubbish in bed, not that Crowley’s expected gratification of any kind from his assignments in a long time.

He hadn’t planned on doing this tonight. His patience for the demonic seductress act is limited at the best of times, and he isn’t inclined to do the bidding of supervisors short-sighted enough to celebrate Thatcher’s reelection, but his other plans have fallen through --

(He catches Aziraphale locking up on his way to dinner. This is the first time he’s even managed to set eyes on the angel since… then. He wants to believe it’s just his bad luck that he’d found the shop shut up and empty every time he stopped by -- not too often, he’s been so careful not to push -- but Aziraphale’s guilty little shuffle tells him otherwise.)

 _No, we’re not thinking about that_. He sways up to the bar, concentrating even harder than usual on looking cool enough to not care about looking cool, and another drink appears before his empty glass hits the black marble. This one had better be stronger than the last few, because he’s just spotted Hell’s suggested target, and the sight of the man’s ungenerous mouth and resentful eyes is already making him tired. Sometimes he thinks Hastur finds more job satisfaction in his employees’ suffering than he does in the actual souls-for-Satan bit.

( _I’m afraid tonight won’t do,_ Aziraphale says, looking down at Crowley from the modest height of the stoop, and the demon might as well be Dives to the angel’s Lazarus, begging the barest touch of comfort from across the uncrossable gulf. _I really must be going._

 _It’s been… a while, angel._ Crowley is standing, yet he feels himself slinking and grasping at Aziraphale’s feet. His chest scraping the ground, dust in his mouth. _Thought we could catch up. Maybe trade off a few jobs, y’know, like we used to. Can’t imagine Heaven’s gotten any less demanding, am I right?_ He tries a laugh, and it tastes like licking the pavement.)

Crowley downs whatever he has in one go, and it burns like well liquor with the barest splash of colored mixer for plausible deniability. The glass clacks on the bartop and a passing bartender drops off another as if by reflex. Crowley shouldn’t be thinking about satisfaction, or the lack thereof; he’s got to fake it convincingly later tonight, for one thing, but he needs to not think about what happens when he does get what he asks for. About how his first fatal impulse is to ask for more. About a locked door that hasn’t unlocked itself for him in sixteen years.

( _I hardly think that’s wise, do you? If it’s come to needing_ insurance _for it._ Aziraphale’s words should be cutting, but his voice is thin with fear. Fear that Crowley put there, the great crashing idiot, as if the angel hadn’t worried enough on his own.

 _Right, fine, fair cop, we can just..._ He’s suddenly afraid that if Aziraphale turns him away tonight he won’t get another chance. _Just talk, that’s all. Whenever’s good for you then, yeah? Tomorrow night? Next week?_

_Crowley --_

He can’t stand his name in that frightened voice. He can’t stand himself. _Please?_

Aziraphale can only shake his head, all his polite falsehoods deserting him for the first time in memory.

Crowley’s driving fast by the time he can face reality again, fast and far away. He’s going to be someone else tonight. He’s going to give someone what they want. He’s going to hurt someone who can’t hurt him back.)

He pushes back from the bar, bracing himself for the first step in this dull dance, but when he almost wipes out on the pivot he realizes those first few drinks (and really “a few” is disingenuous) weren’t nearly as weak as he’d thought. He’s in no shape for the traditional seductive stalk toward his prey, not in these heels; he could sober up, of course, but if he’s sober he might remember who he is and what he deserves. He slams back the new drink instead, struggles against his outraged stomach, insists to his empty glass that he isn’t thinking about what he’s thinking about. The music is getting louder and there’s a warm front of vinyl armpit funk and Drakkar Noir rolling in on his end of the bar and he’s starting to have work flashbacks. Any actual Satanists in the crowd, if they realized how much their afterlife would resemble this dank pit of noise, would surely rededicate their lives to Christ.

Well, Hell be blessed. He turns tail and flees, relying on momentum to keep him mostly upright in these awful boots. There’s a great boom when he crashes full-tilt into the swinging door of the ladies’, but he doesn’t even bother to tell anyone they didn’t hear it. Let them watch! Let them wonder what his problem is; they’ll never, ever guess.

He’s pretty sure it’s the first time he’s ever felt comforted by a public lav. The buffer between the first and second doors effectively silences all but the deepest thud of bass; the black tiles of the walls and the white of the floors are remarkably clean; the air smells only of bleach. He totters sidelong into a wall, which remains reassuringly still, and strips his wig off with a groan of relief. All at once it’s a very good idea to lie down, and his knees oblige him by folding crosswise until he’s draped more or less artistically across the floor.

 _If he could see me now,_ Crowley thinks, rolling his head against the cold ceramic. _A pile of old bones and artifice. Self-thwarting. Convenient, that. Would he be sorry if he knew?_

Then the door opens, and he tries to scramble to his feet, but his legs aren’t in the mood. He knows he should’ve put up some sort of miracle to fend off spectators, an “Out of Order” sign, anything, but here are three pairs of boots at least as formidable as his own approaching, and it’s too late to do anything but blink at them as they converge.

“Hey, you’re on the floor, don’t be on the floor! That’s super gross, come on, get up.” Three sets of hands descend on him and he’s upright without much idea of how they’ve managed it. Three faces swim into view, peering at him with anxious enthusiasm.

“Hi, your wig came off! Do you need help with it?” The speaker’s own hair resembles the ragged black mass in her hand, but twice the height and crackling with AquaNet.

A second girl kicks up her heavy platform and clunks it companionably against his ankle. “Oh my god your legs look so fabulous in those boots I love them! I would fall over so much in that heel!” 

“Those contact lenses are so wicked,” says the third, peering into his face through a prodigious mask of eyeliner, and oh shit his sunglasses -- “You look like a cat witch!”

“They must be really uncomfortable, though, her eyes are watering.”

“Hey no, she’s crying. Hey, girl, don’t cry, your eyelashes will come off. Hey, no --” The raccoon-faced girl brushes both thumbs under Crowley’s eyes and he can’t help the coughing little sob that pulls out of him. “No no no don’t cry! You’re so pretty!”

“Listen.” Platforms grabs his bicep, digs her fingers in hard. “ _Lisssten_. Don’t cry for him, he’s not worth it.”

“You don’t even know him,” Crowley snaps.

Oracular, she fixes him with her eye. “You don’t know who I know. I _know_.”

AquaNet pets Crowley’s padded leather shoulder with clumsy fingers, and he can’t really feel the touch but the intended comfort warms him to the bone. “Okay? He’s not worth crying for if he makes you cry.”

“I’m just not --” this is lunacy, he can’t just spill the secrets of six thousand years to a trio of drunk goth girls, are they even old enough to be here? “-- it’s fine, it’s fine, m’not good enough for him anyway.”

“ _Nooooo!_ ” all three shriek, the tiled chamber echoing with it, and then they break unison in their eagerness to get their stumbling words out first and loudest. 

_No no no you’re so  
can’t let people tell  
love yourself before you  
seriously no one deserves  
have you seen yourself like really  
don’t apologize ever ever_

“But I _hurt_ him,” Crowley sobs, and there go his traitor knees again, but this time when he pitches forward he hits linked arms and he’s lifted back up, rocked close, shielded in a soft strong circle that should feel oppressive but only gives him the safety to wail out his loss. “I’m sorry, I’m _so sorry --_ ”

They sway with him, shushing, soothing, petting him wherever they can reach. They tell him he can cry if he wants. He does want, he does, until the tears come slower and softer, their bitterness passed. And one, pressing her forehead to his temple, whispers urgently in his ear: _You’re good. You’re so good. You’re good. You’re good._

\---

He’s looking up at the oddly mellow fluorescents, sitting propped against the wall, legs tumbled out in front of him. He’d bestowed some rather wobbly benedictions on the three, once he’d managed to persuade them (hovering like worried aunts) that he’d be better after a minute to himself, and for the first time in a while it didn’t hurt to remember how the angel had taught him to do it. The flick of his fingers, the satisfied purse of his lips. The way he’d gleamed when Crowley laid his first successful protection, on a harried mother’s roaming child. How he would finally let himself be grateful when Crowley took an assignment off his hands, after sufficient dithering and fretting to ease his conscience.

Crowley goes to rub his eyes, but someone put his sunglasses back on him while he was trying to get his head back together, and anyway there’s a piece of paper in his hand. Some band flyer pulled off one of the stall doors, pressed on him by the girl who’d insisted on his goodness. He turns it over and finds words scrawled in black kohl pencil.

_You don’t need to be forgiven._

All at once he’s sober, and wholly himself, and for one cold moment he’s convinced they were _sent_ \-- but of course no one Upstairs or Down would have bothered. No, they’d been exactly what they looked like: absurd, and audacious, and incomparably human. They’d had no authority to confer on him a state of grace -- no one did, possibly not even God -- but its power lingers over him like a blessing anyway as he slips out the back door, leaving Hell’s marked man to make his own mistakes a little while longer.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired in part by, and borrowing the punchline from, [this post](https://guarded-affection.tumblr.com/post/189418759882/when-a-drunk-girl-outside-a-club-bathroom-speaks) by guarded-affection on tumblr. 
> 
> The other inspiration was The Eurythmics' "[Love is a Stranger](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6f593X6rv8)," where I got the title. Watch that video and tell me that's not _literally_ Crowley swapping between aesthetics and having feelings in other people's bathrooms.
> 
> A thousand thanks to [Laura Shapiro](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurashapiro/) for a remarkably kind, skillful, and encouraging beta, and to [voidbat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidbat) for being such a goddamned delightful friend and fandom companion that I broke a fifteen-year dry spell to start writing fiction again. And thanks to the fandom for being so lovely and positive that I don't feel half as nervous doing this as I might have otherwise.
> 
> I'm on tumblr at cumaeansibyl, come say hi!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] as you stumble in the debris (London, 1983), by cumaeansibyl](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22903828) by [Thimblerig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig)




End file.
